the fight for the low code

There are a “few” platforms for low code development software, where OutSystems (a portuguese company) rules the market. The main purpose of these platforms is to provide a common set of tools and widgets, empowering low skilled developers and more enterprise oriented people with software that can create applications, so that they can focus on building their business cases with as much little code needed as possible.

All of those low-code software’s give ‘developers’ the tools, platform, workflows and connections, moving the focus to modelling processes, managing orchestrations and delivering. On the other hand, they require an extra effort to understand and some platforms do lock-in, creating a burden when moving out or expanding to something outside of the box.

The thing until last November was that all of those worked outside the major cloud companies. Neither AWS, Azure or Google targeted these low-code developers, but they all offer tools to build everything on them.

Enter Google App Maker, from Google – of course. It’s, as the tin says, the tool to build google apps, for low code developers. It’s a visual interface for people to build apps that work under the Google and Google Apps platform. It has all the necessary orchestration, workflows and connections needed to integrate google apps, but also other outside platforms.

But now (this week) , they opened the platform for G Suite apps, the business accounts that use Google. Meaning that now enterprises have another option to developed applications, doing seamless integration with Google itself.

Is it good? It’s a start! But the potential is there and it will certainly disrupt the low-code app market, as no one will ever offer better integration to Google Apps than Google itself, and that’s a must for almost every enterprise, specially for government that rely on a fast and cheap platform to build things.

Now imagine in a new future when Google offers a capability to move these low-code apps to mobile. The templates are there, it’s just a matter of time and demand now.